‘She doesn’t want Lover Boy waking up?’
‘But I’d never met him, remember. She wouldn’t even tell me his name. Nobody’s even seen him. So I threatened to march into the bedroom and introduce myself.’
‘That would do it.’
‘Aye. Well. She couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. How much did I need? She was practically crying with nerves at this stage. So fuck it: I said a fiver. I thought she’d tell me to chase myself but she goes to his jacket – his jacket’s hanging on the back of a chair – and she gets the money. Pound notes, counts them out. Then she’s practically throwing me out the door.’
‘She took it out his wallet?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you see a photograph when she opened the wallet? A card? Anything with a name on it?’
‘No, but when she was getting the wallet from his pocket something else came out along with it. Like a booklet or something. She nearly ripped the jacket stuffing it back in the pocket and she sort of looked round to see if I’d seen it.’
‘What kind of booklet?’
Denise frowned. ‘Like a passport maybe? I don’t know. But not ours. Something foreign.’
‘Foreign how?’
‘The colour. Kind of a purply blue. Indigo you’d call it.’
Denise dropped the smouldering butt in the ashtray as if she didn’t want to risk her nails. McCormack leaned forward and folded it over, extinguished it under his thumb.
‘What did you need the money for?’
‘None of your business. Food. Ciggies. The usual.’
‘What about friends? Among the girls at the casino?’
‘You mean apart from me? We’re not that friendly. As a rule. They’re mostly bitches, to be honest, the girls at the Claremont. We don’t get too close. Helen was close to one girl, though.’ Denise tilted her head, sighted along her outstretched arm to her lacquered fingernails, red as petals. ‘Until they fell out.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. She said Helen— Well. She told her she’d end up in Black Street.’
McCormack turned to Goldie. You could live in a city for fifteen years and still know nothing.
‘It’s where the VD clinic is.’
‘Right. She was friendly with the clients, then?’
‘Well, you’re not short of offers. It’s a perk of the job.’ She leant a little on ‘perk’, gave it a sarcastic stress.
‘Tell me about the job, Denise. What’s it consist of? What do you do?’
‘Smile.’ She gave a big fake grin. ‘Smile, smile, smile. Keep the punters drunk and happy so they keep spending their money. Ply them with drink. Flirt a bit.’
‘What about the clientele? Who’s your typical punter?’
‘All sorts come in. Gangsters. Bigshot lawyers. Business types. Yanks. Chinks. Cops.’ She said this last word in a stage whisper. ‘They all think you’re dying to spend some time with them.’
‘It’s all that smiling,’ McCormack said. ‘Creates the wrong impression. She didn’t talk about the boyfriend, though, give you any clues? Come on, Denise. She’s your best pal; what else you gonnae talk about?’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? That’s all we’ve got to talk about. Anyway, who said we were best pals? And Helen talk about her boyfriend? She’d talk about anything but. Change the subject when you brought him up. It was actually weird how she avoided it. I think she was involved in something.’ Denise nodded significantly. ‘I think something was preying on her mind.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Different things. Like recently she’d get nervous when certain people were in. Once she dropped a tray of drinks. Another time she said she had a headache and left in the middle of a shift. She’d been right as rain ten minutes before.’
‘Who’s certain people?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Must have been people she knew.’
At this, Denise swung her legs down, stood up and stretched. She tugged on the points of her waistcoat and smoothed her skirt at the back. ‘Well, this has been fun, chaps, but it’s not paying the rent. I need to get ready.’
‘Hold on.’ McCormack stood up too. ‘What about the jacket? The boyfriend’s jacket?’
‘What about it?’
‘Big? Small?’
‘It was hanging on the back of a chair. How would I know what size it was?’
‘Colour, then.
‘Grey, I think. Sort of tartan but not really tartan. A kind of check. Stylish.’
Houndstooth, McCormack thought. No: Prince of Wales. ‘Anything else you can think of, Denise? Anything at all that might help us?’
Denise stepped out to the hall and came back with a short white wet-look coat on. She’d also stepped into her heels and now everything was braced and taut, she was all business and breeze, looked at them with a practised hauteur.
‘There is one thing.’ She flicked her hair out over her collar with a graceful turn of her wrists. ‘We were going into town one day after work. We were walking up Hope Street and these two nuns were coming towards us in the distance and Helen, well it was mad, she just sort of flipped. You could feel her go stiff and she starts cursing these nuns under her breath, calling them all the bitches and whores of the day. Then, when we come alongside them, she leans over and spits on the pavement, right in front of them. Spits at their feet. She was shaking with rage.’
‘Did she say what was wrong?’
‘Naw. She just kept walking. I thought it was funny. It was like she was Orange or something but she comes from Ireland, doesn’t she, so she’s Catholic herself. By the way, isn’t there, like, a reward? For information?’
McCormack stowed his notebook. ‘This is a murder inquiry, Denise. Your pal’s dead. You want a handout for helping us catch the killer?’
Denise didn’t flinch. ‘No harm in asking.’
‘By the way,’ McCormack was inspecting a photo on the mantelpiece, Denise in a summer dress, the Blackpool Tower in the background. ‘Who was the friend?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You said she was close to someone at work. Before they fell out. What was the name?’
‘Carol Strachan.’
‘She still work at the casino?’
‘Last time I looked.’
McCormack put the photograph back. ‘Do you have one of Helen, by any chance?’
‘A photo? Yeah, I think so. Out here.’ They followed her out to the hall. She dug around in a drawer of the hallstand and produced a strip of photobooth images – herself and Helen Thaney, heads together, eyes wide, pouting, mugging for the camera.
‘Thanks.’ McCormack held up the strip. ‘We’ll bring this back.’
McCormack visited the toilet on the way out and caught up with Goldie in the closemouth. They started back up the hill.
‘Thought you were in there, mate.’ Goldie made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘Planning a follow-up visit on your own?’
‘Absolutely. As long as you’re providing the penicillin.’
Goldie stopped. ‘You think she’s on the game?’
‘Unless she’s got a sideline in family planning. She’s got a box of condoms in her bathroom cabinet that would last the Scots Guards for a fortnight.’
They walked along Renfrew Street. Goldie was catching a bus on Hope Street. McCormack carried on into town. On St Vincent Street he pushed through the big brass-plated door of John Smith & Son, Booksellers, and climbed the stairs to the History Department on the fourth floor. He browsed the new arrivals table for a couple of minutes.
A sales clerk kneeling beside a pile of new stock said, ‘Mary Queen of Scots?’ and rose smoothly to his feet. ‘We do. Just a minute, sir.’
He came back holding a book face out between his palms, like someone displaying a religious icon. A new biography had been published earlier that year, he told McCormack. It had sold well and this was the shop’s last copy.
McCormack walked back out on to St Vi
ncent Street with a package under his arm, heading west. He was passing a newsagent’s when the ‘Q’ of ‘QUAKER’ caught his eye. He stopped in front of a poster in a latticed frame: LAIR OF THE QUAKER.
So Cochrane had fed it to the Evening Times. He bought a paper. He stood on the pavement with the book wedged under his arm and leafed through the pages. The cover carried a photo of the sleeping bag in the bed recess: a whisky bottle in the foreground and the army kit-bag at the edge of the shot. More pics on an inside spread, the stacked cans and the paperback books.
How sordid it looked in the newspaper photo. Like the Führerbunker. How furtive and squalid and overexposed. How sinister and ordinary.
25
He watched them nudge each other, speaking out of the sides of their mouths, glancing in his direction. Finally the redhead strode over, earrings flashing, she was the looker of the two, tall and hippy in a grey sheath dress.
She stopped close to McCormack. Beneath the fizz of perfume was a meaty musk. The hair at her temples was damp. She looked as though she’d just had sex. The dark-haired friend drifted across.
McCormack held out the laminated picture, the blown-up passport photo.
‘You recognize her?’
‘Oh yeah.’ The redhead nodded. ‘That’s her. The bitch. That’s her all right’ They were standing in the foyer of the Barrowland, near the cloakroom. Detectives with clipboards were stationed at the entrance to the ballroom and in front of the stairs down to the outside doors. Fifteen minutes earlier McCormack had led a team of six officers – four men, two women – into the dance hall. The band had been stopped and McCormack mounted the stage in his CID raincoat and stood too close to the singer’s microphone. Screech of feedback. Heat from the lights. He was aware of the band behind him, gripping their instruments. The singer stood off to one side, head bowed and hands clasped over his groin, the pallbearer’s stance.
Behind him, projected on to a large white screen, was the photobooth snap of Helen Thaney, pouting next to the grinning head of Denise Redburn. Under the photo was the telephone number of the Marine Police Station. McCormack shielded his eyes from the spotlight’s glare and leaned into the mic. The dancers were in shadow. Some had moved back to their tables, but others stood on the dance floor, waiting for him to speak. They looked curiously vulnerable, standing there with their arms at their sides, their blank white faces turned up to the stage.
The woman on the right, he told the crowd, the woman with dyed blond hair, was Helen Thaney. Twenty-nine years old, of Alexandra Parade in Dennistoun. She spoke with a soft, southern Irish accent. She was found murdered in a derelict tenement at 48 Queen Mary Street in Bridgeton in the early hours of Sunday morning. She spent last Saturday night in the Barrowland Ballroom and may well have met her killer in the dance hall. Anyone who recognizes Helen, or who has any information that may help police identify her killer, should speak to one of the officers stationed in the foyer or else telephone the number on the screen. The domestic situation of all patrons would be respected.
McCormack then left the stage and took his place in the foyer. Behind him the singer announced the next number and the drummer clacked his sticks together four times.
The red-haired girl was called Barbara Bell. She looked like trouble. She had reached that stage of drunkenness where she had decided that she was forcefully and mysteriously alluring. McCormack avoided her eyes as he put his questions.
‘And you’re sure you recognize her?’
‘Uh-huh. Oh yes.’
‘Why are you so certain?’
‘She tried to get off with my boyfriend Frank. Kinda sticks in your mind.’
McCormack could see a wall-mounted payphone over Barbara’s shoulder, a queue of patrons waiting to use it. He could also see the door of the gents toilet. As Barbara spoke, a man in a midnight blue three-button mohair suit came out of the gents, slipping a comb into his inside pocket, moving smartly. He moved with a touch less snap when his eyes locked on to McCormack’s. He drifted over and came to a stop beside the girl.
‘Evening, sir. And your name is?’
‘Francis Gibney. Officer.’
Regimental tie and brown brogues. Three fingers wedged in the ticket pocket of his suit jacket. When McCormack asked him for ID he produced a driver’s licence that gave his address as Deanston Drive in Shawlands.
‘Barbara here’s been telling me about last week. You were present too, I understand. Can you tell me what happened?’
Gibney looked at Barbara and then, as if he’d been caught copying someone else’s work, he stared off into a high corner and frowned in earnest recollection. ‘Well. I really don’t know what to tell you. It was all over in a flash. It was nothing really. I was buying Barbara a ginger and this lassie, this woman appeared beside me at the bar. She said something about the heat – she was fanning herself with a beermat – and how it was thirsty work. Dancing, she meant.’
McCormack waited.
‘So I bought her a drink.’ Gibney’s eyes slid towards Barbara as he said this, then jerked away from the tight flat line of her mouth. ‘Just to be polite. Then the band started up and she sort of grabbed my arm and said that she loved this song and then we were out on the dance floor. Dancing.’
‘Just to be polite,’ Barbara said.
‘Then what?’
‘Then I put a stop to it.’ Barbara leaned in with her chin thrust out, her finger in McCormack’s face. ‘I saw what she was doing. Pressing into him. In that dress. I marched right over and sorted her out. Bitch did this to me.’ She moved the collar of her blouse to reveal twin scratches, three inches long, scabbed roughly over in purple and green. ‘But I got my own back.’ Her smile showed little white teeth. ‘Pulled a clump from the crown of her head. Blond? Some blond. Her roots were black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat.’
A group of teenage top boys moved in loose formation through the foyer in their Reid and Taylor threads, just the top button of their jackets fastened. They passed McCormack. One of them said something in an undertone. The others laughed. McCormack watched them out of sight.
‘Last Saturday night,’ he said to Gibney. ‘What were your movements last Saturday night, Mr Gibney? Once you left the dance hall.’
Gibney shuffled his feet, frowned a bit to show he was thinking. ‘We left here at maybe half-eleven, twelve. Got a cab at the Cross, out to Barbara’s place on Victoria Road?’
‘And you stayed there all night?’
‘Well, no.’ He glanced at the girl. ‘No. I stayed for maybe an hour. Then I went home.’
‘Shawlands?’
‘That’s right. Deanston Drive. Number eighty-seven.’
‘Another cab?’
‘No. I walked it. Through the park.’ He nodded firmly, as if this might bring the proceedings to a close.
McCormack was writing in his notebook. He looked up. ‘How long did it take you to walk through the park, Mr Gibney?’
‘I don’t know. Ten minutes. Fifteen max.’
‘Right. So you got home at, what, 2 a.m.?’
‘That’s right. There or thereabouts.’
There was a slice of jangly guitar as someone pushed through the doors from the dance hall, then the doors swung back and muffled it.
‘And you live alone, do you, at Deanston Drive?’
A sickly grin split Gibney’s face. McCormack deadpanned him. Gibney’s fingers were scrabbling again in his ticket pocket. ‘Officer. Look. This is a wee bit embarrassing.’ He turned his back on the girl. From his ticket pocket he brought out something shiny, showed it to McCormack on his palm before slipping it back in his pocket. The domestic situation of patrons.
‘And your wife,’ McCormack said. ‘She’ll vouch for you? She’ll confirm that you came home at …?’
A patron pushed between them, stumbling, drunk, heading for the toilets.
Gibney watched the drunk with something like envy. ‘Yes,’ he said morosely. ‘I suppose so. I mean, she didn’t hear me come in.
I didn’t want to wake her so I slept on the couch.’
‘That was very considerate of you.’
He left them arguing in vehement whispers beside the cigarette machine and jogged downstairs to meet up with the others.
Back at the Marine they talked it out. The canvass at the Barrowland had been something of a mixed bag. Barbara Bell wasn’t alone in having spotted Helen Thaney. Lots of people had seen her. But the picture that emerged was confusing. Helen Thaney had been dancing with a tall man in a light grey suit. She’d been sharing a table with a heavy, short man who looked like David Frost. Then it was a long-haired man with a Zapata moustache. No, it was a chib-marked top boy in a yellow shirt and a polka-dot tie.
You had the feeling that people were filing out to the foyer just to feel important, to play a part in the Quaker story, telling the police whatever rubbish came into their heads. But each separate version was confirmed by more than one witness and it soon became clear that they were all telling the truth. Helen Thaney – clearly making the most of the boyfriend’s absence – had been seen with half a dozen different men by dozens of different witnesses.
Good-time girl. That was the phrase that they would use, the police, the papers. That was the code-word. Slut was what it stood for. Hoor.
A few people mentioned the fight between Barbara and Helen Thaney. There was some hair-tugging and scratching but the bouncers were on it in a flash. Fights between women were awkward. With men you just threw them out, tossed them in the Gallowgate gutter. With women, the bouncers generally settled for a warning, told them both to cool it.
McCormack sat at his desk in the Marine, piecing it together. Helen Thaney in a tight white dress. Helen Thaney dancing with five or six men. Helen Thaney in a catfight. It sounded like someone who’d lost control, but he saw now what Thaney was doing. She was in total control. She was registering her presence. She was making sure she’d be remembered.
The Quaker Page 18